John Oliver’s Complicated Fun Connects for HBO

John Oliver's show “Last Week Tonight” already has an average audience — live and repeats — of four million people.CreditCreditEric Liebowitz/HBO

Every once in a while, it’s nice to be wrong about something.

When HBO announced last fall that John Oliver, a British comedian I very much admire, would be hosting a weekly show focused on current events, I remember thinking, “That will never work.”

Given that the news cycle is measured in fractions of a second and that “The Daily Show” — Mr. Oliver’s longtime professional home — and “The Colbert Report” both squeeze laughs from daily annotations of news events, where was the runway for this program? Anybody who thinks a weekly schedule built on news is easy should ask the editors of Time, Newsweek or New York magazine. Furthermore, the last time a Brit pointed a crooked finger at American foibles — although Piers Morgan did news, not comedy — it didn’t turn out well.

Yet here we are, at the end of Mr. Oliver’s first season with “Last Week Tonight” — he will return in February — and the show has been a smash, with strong ratings, a dedicated fan base and a series of clips on YouTube that have melted the Internet. He helped drive attention to the debate on net neutrality, and last week, President Obama urged the Federal Communications Commission to stand tall on that basic principle.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Net Neutrality (HBO)CreditCreditVideo by LastWeekTonight

So what did Mr. Oliver and his colleagues get right, and what did I get so wrong?

I stopped to see Mr. Oliver at his office on West 57th, across the street from the show’s studio. Mr. Oliver is a 37-year-old comedian hardly in the mold of a television star. His teeth are, well, British, and his hair is not something frequently seen on the small screen. And even though he wears nice suits on the show, they look as if they landed on him from a great distance.

With the show on break, he is wearing sneakers, a blue sweatshirt and green pants. I told him what a bad idea I originally thought his show was, which he finds hilarious, not because he has proved me wrong, but because I was probably kind of right.

He agreed that his time as a substitute host for “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central during summer 2013 had gone well, but, he pointed out, that was “driving someone else’s elegantly made machine. I had been a cog in that machine, so I knew how it worked.”

“When HBO asked, I sort of felt like I had to say yes,” he added. “I was attracted to that dead spot late on Sunday night on HBO, which is the prime-est real estate that there is. I loved the idea that we could build something and that we would live or die by our attempt.”

What he and his co-creators came up with was counterintuitive to the prevailing conventions of television, not to mention journalism. Each half-hour episode contained a big explainer of a complicated issue. The list of topics sounds like the arcane scraps from the cutting-room floor of most newsrooms — the amount of hidden sugar in food, civil forfeiture, the false hopes of lotteries, the failure of the American government to safeguard people who served as interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If all that sounds like audience kryptonite, it has been anything but. The show already has an average audience — live and repeats — of four million people, equal to “Real Time With Bill Maher” and approaching the numbers that HBO comedies like “Girls” and “Veep” attract.

And that isn’t the only measure of the show’s impact. Each week, HBO releases clips of “Last Week” on YouTube and the numbers have been huge: One on the Miss America pageant’s flimsy scholarship claim received 6.7 million spins, while a long takedown of FIFA and the World Cup had 8.5 million plays.

The show’s sudden influence was felt most acutely on the arcane issue of net neutrality, which Mr. Oliver introduced this way: “Oh my god, that is the most boring thing I’ve ever seen! That is even boring by C-Span standards.”

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The future of protecting an open Internet has been the subject of fierce debate, and potential changes to the rules by the Federal Communications Commission could affect your online experience.

But after a string of jokes explaining the technology, the stakes and the power dynamics, Mr. Oliver concluded with a call to the underbelly of the Internet to urge the F.C.C. not to cave to moneyed interests and demand that the web remain a level playing field. “We need you to get out there and for once in your lives, focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction!” he said. “Seize your moment, my lovely trolls. Turn on caps lock and fly, my pretties! Fly, fly, fly!”

The next day, the commission’s site went on tilt, with a message that read, “We’ve been experiencing technical difficulties with our comment system due to heavy traffic.” The day afterward, the National Cable Television Association, institutional opponents of increased regulation, happened to be meeting and screened Mr. Oliver’s bit. “They knew they had a problem,” said an industry veteran who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting.

The Verge obtained internal email correspondence at the F.C.C., including a note that read, “Who knew NN” — net neutrality — “could be fodder for comedy?”

Mr. Oliver knew. Nu Wexler, a policy spokesman for Twitter, said that at a meeting of lobbyists and policy types on the net neutrality issue last summer, they thought Mr. Oliver’s piece trumped many other efforts.

“We all agreed that John Oliver’s brilliant net neutrality segment explained a very complex policy issue in a simple, compelling way that had a wider reach than many expensive advocacy campaigns,” he said.

So, I asked Mr. Oliver: Is he engaging in a kind of new journalism? He muttered an oath, the kind he can say on HBO for comic emphasis, but we don’t say here, adding, “No!”

“We are making jokes about the news and sometimes we need to research things deeply to understand them, but it’s always in service of a joke. If you make jokes about animals, that does not make you a zoologist. We certainly hold ourselves to a high standard and fact-check everything, but the correct term for what we do is ‘comedy.’ ”

A big segment on “Last Week” builds on the reporting of others — The Washington Post, for instance, on civil forfeiture — and finds the comedy by digging into the absurdities that underlie much of the news. The piece on the visa problems of war-zone interpreters was framed by a donkey, befriended by United States troops, who had a much easier time of it.

Everyone loves a good donkey joke, but still, how is it that explainers of big, complicated current events — the programming equivalent of creamed spinach — have become digital catnip? I think there is, right now, a hunger for a kind of slow news, thoughtful takes that won’t fit inside a Twitter feed. Stephen Colbert demonstrated with his stunt super PAC that topical comedy on dry but important matters can educate in addition to bringing the belly laughs.

It helps that Mr. Oliver, a perpetually amused and amusing presence, is the one telling the story.

“The bet we made was on that voice,” said Richard Plepler, chief executive of HBO. “We didn’t have much doubt that he would find a way to break through the clutter and he did.”

With his Birmingham accent, Mr. Oliver is about as far from a posh Brit as you can get. And what comes flying out of his mouth is not just a tutorial, but a kind of a jeremiad, a goad to be a better version of ourselves.

Mr. Oliver, married to a former United States combat medic, has an immigrant’s ardor for America. After he received his green card and the staff of “The Daily Show” presented him with a slice of apple pie topped with a little flag and a can of Budweiser on the side, he choked up. He is an odd version of a patriot, laughing at the failings of an imperfect union but using the language of “I” and “we” when he talks about things that should make the rest of us angry.

“I think I’m entitled to say ‘we’ now,” he said. “I love living here, I love this country, I’ve married an American, I want to stay regardless of what happens. I’ve been here 10 years and I’m not going anywhere. This is my home.”

Wow, it sounds as if Mr. Brit comedy guy has drunk the Uncle Sam Kool-Aid.

“You have to admit the Kool-Aid is pretty tasty, even if it isn’t perfect,” he said.